Annual Airworthiness Infomation Reporting

Every owner of a Canadian airplane is required to file an Annual Airworthiness Information Report for that airplane. It's not a big deal. Most of the time the information to file per airplane is shorter than the term Annual Airworthiness Information Report. It's almost as short as the abbreviation, AAIR. In the bad old days, they sent you a paper form with a built in carbon paper and you filled in the appropriate blanks. I have a few of the forms here, for reasons I will disclose later, so let's check them out.

Most of the form is already populated with the registration data of the aircraft, weight and engines and propellers and such. It's the same information you find in the Canadian Civil Aircraft Register. In fact, an odd error on the AAIR for one of our planes is reflected in a weirdness in the registry entry for that plane, so I suspect they draw on the same database. The data I add to the form is when the last inspection was performed, who did it, and how many hours the airplane flew in the calendar year. We bought a plane late last year from a private individual, and the total time flown in 2015, including flying it to our base for a still-in-progress makeover, was nine hours.

There are still people who own airplanes and not computers, so the forms persist, but I've been doing ours at my current company for the last three or four years, and I do them online. I'm "computer literate" "detail oriented," and anal about stuff getting done on time (what's the resume version of that? "able to work to deadline"?) so I'm a good fit for the job. The forms are due March 30th, but there's no reason not to file them as soon as the year is over, so they were on my list for this month. Today the forms, the actual forms that I hadn't seen for maybe ten years, turned up on my desk with letters on them. The letter tells me that Transport Canada is going to begin electronic notification of the Annual Airworthiness Information Report in order to reduce its environmental footprint and better manage public funds. It informs me that, You are receiving this notification because we do not have an e-mail address or fax number on your aircraft file. The paper forms are pre-populated with data that includes both a valid e-mail and fax number.

They literally sent me a form with my e-mail printed on it, in order to ask me for my e-mail. I suppose it could have been worse. They could have e-mailed and asked for my e-mail. But that way I wouldn't have to walk over to the recycling with all these forms and letters. I e-mailed the AAIR people to tell them about this, and to thank them for the laugh. I flew two hour and did paperwork for the rest of the day.